Homeowners, gardeners, maintenance workers, and others who require water to maintain or clean outdoor areas are constantly looking for ways to manage and simplify their access to water sources. Conventional garden hoses made of rubber or heavy rubber-like materials reinforced with embedded webbing or fabric strands tend to be difficult to handle—they can be heavy and fairly stiff, resisting uncoiling, especially when cool, causing them to be dragged across, and causing damage to, nearby plants or landscape features when the user tries to stretch the hose to reach a remote location. When lighter weight plastics are used to manufacture such hoses, they tend to kink and/or puncture easily.
One relatively recent approach to the drawbacks of conventional rubber hoses has been the flat hose, for example, those sold under the trademarks XHOSE® and POCKET HOSE® (see, e.g., U.S. Design Pat. No. 731,032), which combines a thin, flexible, highly expandable PVC (polyvinylchloride) tubing surrounded by a NYLON® or other fabric sleeve, with conventional hose fittings on the ends. Such hoses are lightweight and easy to manage, but possess a number of disadvantages, including catastrophic failures that can occur at stress points along the hose, causing the hose to form a bubble at a weak point and abruptly burst. Also, they are easily punctured by cactus spines, sticks, and sharp edges that may be encountered while working in a garden or construction site, and are subject to damage by pets or other animals chewing on the hose. Finally, because pressure is necessary to expand the hose to allow water to flow, the flat hoses are ineffective for applications such as transferring water from rain barrels or other non-pressurized water sources.
A type of hose that is often used in industrial settings has a braided or coiled metal outer hose encasing a flexible inner rubber or PVC hose. Metal-shelled hoses possess several desirable features, include resistance to burst, crush, puncture, and abrasion. Such hoses are comparable in weight to conventional rubber hoses, or even lighter, but are easier to flex for positioning, provided that the degree of curvature is large enough that they are not forced to bend at a sharp angle. The bending limitation tends not to be a problem in industrial applications, where hoses are used to attach a stationary machine to a water source and are not subject to frequent re-positioning, however, it can become a significant problem for use in the garden or around the home, where stretching and pulling on the hose around corners are commonplace. Since the usual manner of reaching a remote location with a garden hose is to keep pulling until it stops, a considerable amount of stress and strain can be applied to fitting at the faucet end of the hose. While a rubber or flat hose may be able to hold up to being pulled at a relatively sharp angle near the faucet end, the outer shell of a metal hose is susceptible to kinks and breakage if pulled too forcefully at an angle that is less that the natural curvature of the metal shell, permanently crimping or distorting the protective metal coils and exposing the inner tubing to damage. Thus, while many of the features of a hose with an outer metal shell would be desirable for garden hose applications, existing metal-shelled hoses are not constructed to tolerate the abuse to which everyday garden hoses are frequently subjected. Accordingly, the need remains for a hose design that provides the advantages of a metal-shell construction while minimizing the risk of damage from common uses.